Berni Schiefer is an IBM Fellow in the IBM Analytics Group. He is based in San Francisco at the IBM Spark Technology Center and is responsible for a global team that focusses on the performance and scalability of products and solutions in the Analytics Group, specifically for Big Data technologies including Spark, BigInsights, Big SQL, dashDB, DB2 pureScale and DB2 with BLU acceleration. His passion is in bringing advanced technology to market with an emphasis on exploiting processor, memory, networking, storage technology, and other hardware and software acceleration technologies.Since joining IBM Canada 1985, he has worked closely with many customers, ISVs and business partners around the world. Berni has a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Saskatchewan and received the Alumni of Influence Award in 2016.